Funding Question from Yogeshwar

Hi saket,
I have a query regarding financial support form which needs to be filled for admission. What kind of impact this form can have on my appln ? If I declare that I cannot attend the school without financial aid, whether it is good/bad ? If one gets RA/TA, then this financial doc has less importance?

Any extra info regarding this, will be helpful.

Hi Yogeshwar, yes you are right about this. The financial support form itself is just needed for visa purposes. When you are admitted, the university issues you an I-20 that lists among other things the total cost of education at the university, how much the university is willing to shell out for you and also the money you/your family is willing to invest. Sending the financial support form just makes your life easier, and the whole transaction for admission easier. Schools will also conditionally admit you and ask for this financial support document to be filled before they send you an I-20. That is probably fine too, but just implies that you'll probably waste a couple of weeks in mailing things back and forth. Other than that filling out that form doesn't have an impact on your application.

The second part you mentioned in the query does have an impact on your application... if you mention in the application that you don't want to be considered for admission unless you are being offered funding, you will get an immediate reject letter if the program cannot support you. I feel that is not a good thing to do. Your chances for getting aid or admission are more or less fixed. Checking a box that says admit only if funded doesn't have an impact on your worthiness for admission, but just means that even if you were good enough to get admission only, you won't find out about it. So my suggestion is to say that you are okay with attending even if you don't have funding to begin with. If the school considers you worthy of financial aid, they will inform you all the same.

Graduate School Applications from India drop

Graduate school applications from India and South Korea have dropped last year. This according to a report from the Wall Street Journal:

The council survey of U.S. institutions, which fielded more than 400,000 applications in all, showed growth of applications from China along with the Middle East and Turkey, up 16% and 20% from 2008, respectively. But applications from India and South Korea fell 9% and 7%, respectively.

Looks like the problems with getting jobs and H1B visas, the relatively better economy is affecting applications. Could it also be related to this other article on WSJ?

Another Financial Aid Post

Harsh recently asked in the comments about financial aid. I think this requires a fresh post outlining my experiences and observations from a few years ago.

In the years I was at UW-Madison (2002-2004), most Indian grad students in ECE at UW-Madison didn't get funding from the department along with admission. This was something I faced back then too, and honestly it was discouraging enough for me that I was even considering not enrolling at all. My parents were professors at a medical college in India and $12,000 in tuition every semester was a very large amount in rupees for us. They could support me for a year without funding, but somehow I felt terrible about spending so much out of my parents nest-egg on my education.

2002 was a tough year for jobs with the 2001 recession still looming large. Many employers in India, such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro had deferred their offers for the 2001 batch. Many smart seniors were killing time at home without a job for a whole year at times. That did affect grad school admissions too and I think admissions in 2002 were a lot tougher than 2000/2001 (based on the GRE score + academic profiles). For Electrical Engineering nobody I knew got accepted at any top 10 schools apart from some at University of Michigan.

Anyways so when I arrived in Madison, I was a practically peniless and even a $5 sub seemed expensive in rupees. I was planning to save every penny in order to avoid asking my parents for a lot of money. Most of my seniors in Madison were funded and they were very helpful. My hosts, Rajas, Amar and Manoj gave me a lot of ideas on how to go about looking for positions. About 11 days after I arrived I obtained funding for a programming job in the Physics department. I had heard about a couple of seniors who were teaching assistants in the Physics or the Math departments. There were some seniors who were working at the library on their IT systems. Some seniors were also TAs in ECE itself. The short answer is that there was a lot of demand for programming skills all over the campus. In my second year I luckily got an Research Assistantship in ECE itself. I interned at GE for a semester and beyond that point I was fairly rich for a student. I bought a car, a laptop, a camera... so most of my needs were satisfied.

TAs were usually 33% (or 13 hours a week) appointments and earned about $800 a month. Some 50% appointments (or 20 hours a week) as RAs earned about $1500 a month. This includes a complete tuition waiver and health insurance.

So my thoughts on funding:
- As much as I could tell it used to work out. People in those days paid tuition for a semester and were able to find funding within one semester. My ex-roommate didn't get funding in Fall 2002 itself but was later able to find a job somewhere recording video and burning CDs for some department related to African history.
- Programming is a really good skill to have for such jobs. Another friend I knew used to write Perl code to maintain a website for some department. And that paid for his tuition. So managing websites and having some samples may be a good idea.
- There is no point worrying about this before you even have admission. Most of these jobs require in-person interviews. So there is nothing you can do about them until you arrive on campus.
- What impact will the drop in federal funding have on such jobs? I have no way to tell. People currently at the university are your best bet for these questions. Again if there is a dearth of jobs in the real world, students tend to stay longer in school and that could affect your chances of getting funding. So take the above statements with a pinch of salt. There is some likelihood that things have changed.